Samsung news: new SoC, rebranded apps, lost security

Samsung made a series of moves lately, all with the aim of streamlining their mobile efforts. The South Korean company is forging ahead with a new SoC, and branding their apps anew. A report also claims they will be giving up on one of the features that made them attractive to enterprise customers.

A new SoC, the Exynos ModAP, will be their first to incorporate LTE. The quad-core chipset is built using 28nm processing, and takes dead aim at Qualcomm’s business. To date, the Snapdragon is the only major SoC with LTE integration.

On Samsung devices, the “Samsung Apps” market serves to provide users with apps that work exclusively on — or best with — their devices. Many of those devices happen to be branded with Samsung’s flagship Galaxy moniker, so they’ve gone ahead and rebranded their store “Galaxy Apps”. This change only affects Android devices, though — Tizen will see something different, but it’s not known what that will be just yet. A slight UI upgrade comes with the name change, which follows a more Android design.

A report from Forbes suggests that Samsung is also ditching KNOX, their security feature that has some serious enterprise angles. It lets administrators better secure devices, and provides a more secure connection to enterprise servers.

The move is said to be in response to dipping sales figures, and KNOX’s poor implementation, which is said to be less than 2% on Samsung devices. Google also baked in some very competitive features into Android, which they announced at I/O. That could have been the result of Google’s handshake patent deal with Samsung, wherein Samsung could have effectively handed KNOX off to Google.

From branding to services, there’s a lot going on for Samsung mobile. A new Exynos SoC may give them a needed inroad to better profit margins, which their recent downturn in both sales and profits indicate is needed.